My name is Manal al-Sharif. I’m from Saudi Arabia. I want to tell you about
two separate chapters of my life. Chapter one is the story of my generation;
it begins the year I was born, 1979.

On November 20 of that year, there was a siege of Mecca, the holiest shrine
in the world for Muslims. It was seized by Juhayman al-Otaybi, a militant
Islamist, and some 400 of his men. The occupation lasted for two weeks.
Saudi authorities had to use force—heavily armed force—to eject the
occupiers and end the violation. They beheaded Juhayman and his men
publicly.

Nevertheless, the authorities became very anxious. They feared another
uprising. Saudi Arabia was newly formed, rapidly changing, and had been
adopting a new civil way of life. For rebel militants, such changes were
against their beliefs, against Islam, and they wanted to stop them.

So, although the Saudi government had executed Juhayman, it began to abide
by his doctrine. In order to prevent another uprising, extremists in power
quickly moved to roll back liberties that had been tolerated in previous
years. Like Juhayman, some ruling Saudis had long been upset over the
gradual loosening of restrictions for women. In the weeks after the Mecca
uprising, female announcers were removed from television. Pictures of women
were banned. All possible female employment was narrowed to two fields:
education or healthcare.

Activities that encouraged male-female contact were curbed: Music was
banned; cinemas were closed; the separation between genders was strictly
enforced everywhere. That separation became law, from public places to
government offices, to banks, schools, even to our own houses. In time, each
house in Saudi Arabia ended up having two entrances: one for men, one for
women.

There was another sea change: Petrodollars began to pour into those
extremists’ pockets. They used that money to spread missionary teachers
around the world, many of whom preached hatred of the infidel, dedication to
global jihad, and a rejection of anyone who didn’t share the same ideals.

Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,
or “the religious police,” was also given a free hand in society. In other
words, the ruling authorities had beheaded a monster, but they had enshrined
his ideology of hate.

Saudi authorities tried their best to put the story of the rebellion out of
public memory, and so they moved to purge all articles and records from
magazines and newspapers, hoping that history would be erased and people
would forget about Juhayman.

But his memory remained. I remember one day, it was Hajj time and I was
performing tawaf with my mother. This is a ritual in which you walk in
circles around Kaaba, the most holy of Muslim shrines in Mecca. There was a
hole in one of Kaaba’s walls, and as we walked around, Mom pointed to it and
said, “That’s a hole from a bullet, from the time of Juhayman.”

Juhayman. The name itself brings terror to Muslims around the world. For me,
that hole went beyond those walls. It went back in time; it was like a hole
that we Saudis fill in, and continue to fill in. And so we keep going
backward in my country.

The eighties went by, and the years after that brought the Afghan War and
historic events in the Soviet Union. In the meantime, the extremists had
become very powerful in Saudi Arabia, promoting their ideas and forcing
everyone to abide by strict rules.

Leaflets, books, and cassettes calling for jihad in Afghanistan and
insisting on ejecting all non-Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula were given
out freely. I was one of the youths recruited to distribute them. A
twenty-two-year-old man was among those fighting for jihad. His name was
Osama bin Laden. Such were the heroes of our time. In the days of
Sahwa—al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Awakening—one of the main
subjects of debate was women. I was taught that if I left home, I would be
fully responsible for any evil that would befall me, because men cannot be
expected to control their instincts. I am the seductive fruit, they said,
and I would seduce men in all my shapes and forms. So I was made to stay
home.

For Saudi extremists I was awra. The word awra means a sinful thing, an
intimate part of the body you should not show. It is against the law to
disclose it. By the time I was ten I was covering myself fully.

My face was awra, my voice was awra. Even my name was awra. Women cannot be
called by name, so they are called “daughter of” a man’s name, “wife of” a
husband, or “mother of” one of her sons.

There were no sports for women, no engineering schools. There was also, of
course, no driving. And how could there be? We weren’t even allowed to have
identity cards with pictures, except for passports, which were only
necessary to leave the country.

We were voiceless. We were faceless. We were nameless. And we were
completely invisible.

Our lives had been stolen with a lie: We are doing this to protect you from
the prying eyes of men, they told us. You deserve to be treated like a
queen.

But during that time, something happened to show that not everyone was going
along with this. On November 6, 1990, forty-seven courageous women emerged
to challenge the ban on women driving. They went out into the streets of
Riyadh and drove. The women were detained, banned from leaving the country,
and dismissed from their jobs. I remember receiving that news when I was a
kid. We were told that those women were really bad. Afterwards, there was a
fatwa. The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia said that a woman driving was haram,
forbidden in Islam. A television announcer came on to say that the Minister
of the Interior had warned that women were not allowed to drive in the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

For the next twenty-two years, we were not even supposed to talk about women
driving, whether on television and news broadcasts, or in magazines and
newspapers.

So, yet another taboo was created.

The first had prevented us from talking about Juhayman; the second prevented
us from talking about women driving.

But something else happened in that first chapter of my young life: the
attack on Khobar Towers, a housing complex for foreign military personnel.
The Towers were bombed on June 25, 1996, and, according to the Saudi
government, the attack had been carried out by Saudi Islamic militants,
including many veterans of the Afghan War. Nineteen US Air Force personnel
had been killed and 372 more people of various nationalities injured.

I remember my mother gasping when she saw the pictures. “Juhayman is back,”
she said.

I was only seventeen, and it surprises me now to recall it, but I had no
sympathy for the dead. I was brainwashed, I had been brought up in a
particular time; I was the product of a terrorist culture.

The change in my life started four years later, in 2000. That year, the
Internet was introduced in Saudi Arabia. It was the first time I went
online. Now, let me give you a picture of myself: as an extremist, I covered
myself from head to toe. I had always followed that custom strictly. I also
loved drawing, but one day when they told us in school that it was sinful to
draw portraits of animals or people, I felt I had to comply. I dutifully
took all my paintings and drawings and burned them. Meanwhile, I found
myself burning inside. This was not fair. I had learned as much from a
computer. The Internet, you see, was the first door for Arab youth to
venture into the outside world. I was young, thirsty to learn about other
people and other religions. I started communicating with people who held
different opinions, and soon those conversations raised questions in my
head. I began to realize how very small was the box I was living in. It
looked all the smaller once I stepped out of it. Slowly, I started to lose
my phobia of having my pure beliefs polluted.

Let me tell you another story. Do you remember the first time you listened
to music? Do you remember your very first song? I do. I was twenty-one years
old. It was the first I had ever allowed myself to listen to music. I
remember the song: It was “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely,” by the
Backstreet Boys.

Maybe it will help you to understand if I tell you that I used to burn my
brother’s cassettes in the oven. I was that extreme. And then I listened to
that song.

They had told us that music was Satan’s flute, a path to adultery, a door to
sin. But the song I heard sounded so pure, so beautiful, so angelic. It
could be anything but evil to me. It was then that I realized how lonely I
was in my isolated little world.

Another important moment for me was 9/11, a turning point for so many people
in my generation. When the events of 9/11 happened, the extremists said it
was God’s punishment to Americans for what they had done to us over the
years.

I was confused about which side to take. I had been brought up to hate any
non-Muslims or anyone who didn’t practice Islam as we viewed it. But when I
watched the breaking news that night, I saw a man throwing himself from one
of the World Trade Center towers. He was falling, straight down, escaping
the fire.

That night I couldn’t sleep. The picture was in my head, and it was ringing
a bell. Something is wrong, it was telling me. No religion on Earth can be
this bloody, this cruel, this merciless.

Al Qaeda later announced their responsibility for the attacks. My heroes
were no more than horrifying, bloody monsters. It was the turning point of
my life.

After 9/11, Saudi Arabia faced a sweep of terrorist attacks on our own land.
The interesting outcome? A few months later, for the first time, authorities
started issuing women identification papers. Even though an appointed male
needed to give the permission, we were finally being recognized as citizens
in our own country.

Which brings me to chapter two: driving for freedom. In this chapter, the
inspiration was the Arab Spring—for me as for so many of my generation. I
had been leaving my doctor’s clinic at nine o’clock one night, and couldn’t
find a ride home. A car kept following me and the men in it almost kidnapped
me. The next day at work I complained to my colleague how frustrating it was
that I have a driver’s license from traveling overseas, but at home I’m not
allowed to drive because I’m a woman. He said the simplest thing: “But there
is no law banning you from driving.” A fatwa was a fatwa. Not a law. That
plain truth ignited everything. It was June 2011, and a group of women,
Saudis all, decided to start a movement, “Drive Your Own Life.”

It was to be a very straightforward campaign, using social media and calling
women to come out and drive on one single day, June 17. We encouraged women
with international drivers’ licenses only to participate, as we didn’t want
to cause accidents.

That day, I recorded a video of myself driving. I used my face, my voice, my
real name. I was determined to speak for myself. I had once been ashamed of
who I was, a mere woman, but not anymore. When I posted that video on
YouTube, it got 700,000 views on the first day.

Clearly, I was not alone. On June 17, when we called for women to come
forward, some 100 brave women drove. The streets of Riyadh were packed with
police cars and religious police SUVs were posted in every corner of the
city. But of the 100 who drove, not one was arrested. We had broken the
taboo on driving.

The next day, I was arrested and sent to jail. A riot broke out around Saudi
Arabia, and people were divided in two camps: one called for my trial and a
flogging in a public place. They called me a whore, an outcast, licentious,
immoral, rebellious, disobedient, Westernized, a traitor and double agent to
boot. Pages sprang up on Facebook to denounce me, claiming that men would
take their igals, cords Arab men wear on their heads, and thrash any woman
who dared break the taboo and drive. Women shot back, “We will throw shoes
at you.” So it was a full fight between genders.

I didn’t realize until after I was released from prison how many people had
been inspired by a simple act that many women do every single day. The
support that was rallied around the world led to my release nine days later.

This is not about driving a car. It is about being in the driver’s seat of
our destiny. I now say that I can measure the impact we made by how harsh
the attacks were. It’s this simple: We’ve started a movement in Saudi
Arabia. We call it the Saudi Woman’s Spring.

We believe in full citizenship for women, because a child cannot be free if
his mother is not free. A husband cannot be free if his wife is not free.
Parents are not free if their daughters are not free. Society is nothing if
its women are nothing.

Freedom starts from within.

I am free. But I have to admit that when I go home to Saudi Arabia, it’s not
the same for everyone. The struggle has just begun.

I don’t know how long it will last, and I don’t know how it will end. But I
do know that a drenching rain begins with a single drop. And eventually
there are flowers.
===

This essay is adapted from Manal al-Sharif’s speech at the Oslo Freedom
Forum in May 2012.